


cover story

by ottermo



Series: out of the cave [1]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Found Family, Friendship, Gen, these two are twins now and nobody can take it from me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-26 03:38:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19759828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ottermo/pseuds/ottermo
Summary: People think they're twins. It makes sense, when she thinks about it.





	cover story

At school, they call her Jane. She thinks that’s best. For one thing, she can’t be publically known by a number, not while there might still be bad men looking for her. For another, it’s new. A different name for a different place.

She’d thought about going by ‘Eleanor’, for the ease of being called ‘El’, which she’s used to. But that’s so wrapped up in Mike, that one-time codename, snapped hastily to cover for her in the corridor of his old middle school. It’s easier to be Jane here, Jane whose hair is past her shoulders, Jane who’s never had so much as an accidental nosebleed. Not anybody Mike knew.

The only real bridging factor between El-that-was and Jane-who-is turns out to be Will, and it’s good, she thinks, because they need each other. High school is an entirely new concept for both of them, and neither has ever held out much hope of fitting in. They stick together, a lot of the time. It’s funny, really, because in Hawkins they had barely spent a moment alone, and now she can’t imagine being without him.

“What’s it like, being a twin?” somebody asks her in the second week, and she flinches at the question. But, running it over in her mind, she understands where the misconception comes from: they’re siblings, in fact now as well as feeling, siblings the same age, who barely leave each other’s side.

And so she says, “Good,” and it’s the truth.

Being twins works well for them, as it turns out. When the guidance counsellor calls Joyce, the concerns are punctuated with, “Of course, it’s not unusual for twins to prefer each other’s company,” which makes it easier to explain why sometimes Will has to elaborate for her when the words run short. She’s getting there, but she’ll probably never be a paragraphs person.

Stripped of her powers, she’s not much good against school bullies these days, but then, the high school kids seem to deal more in words than physical threats. Sometimes it’s only looks. At first, she’d assumed it was her own fault.

“You can leave me,” she’d told Will frankly. “I understand.”

He’d frowned at that. “Why would I leave you?”

“To get friends.”

Somehow that had amused him. “I wouldn’t know how, even if I wanted to. People don’t ignore us because of you. Or not _just_ because of you, anyway.”

She begins to understand it later, watching from the tennis court as the boys’ class stumbles out of the gym and onto the football field. Will isn’t like the rest of them, not quite occupying the same space, which is ironic, now that the gate is closed for good.

So she stops feeling that she’s holding him back, and learns to exist alongside him. They are each other’s shell to the outside world. By Joyce’s special request, they have most of their classes together, although she has to go to remedial English while Will’s in advanced biology. It’s a bit of a bore, because she understands it all, just writes slower than the rest of them, and sometimes leaves out words that don’t seem important. Again, the twin thing comes in handy. The teacher, Mrs Cohen, tuts at her sympathetically and says, “Remember, sweetie, Will isn’t here to finish that sentence for you. Can you fill it in yourself?”

It’s a long process, but she has a quick mind, and a good memory. If she doesn’t know something, and Will’s not there to whisper it, she keeps quiet. Mostly. She’s not above identifying the odd ‘mouthbreather’ here and there.

There are difficult moments, for both of them. Nightmares. Sometimes she sees Billy’s face so clearly she could reach out and touch him. It’s how Will feels about the Mindflayer, too: a shadow on his soul, gate or no gate. 

And of course, there’s Mike, or the lack of him. Sometimes she isn’t sure who misses him more, which should make her jealous, but doesn’t. It actually kind of helps. Will’s her static now, the closest she can get to visiting Mike when a phone call just won’t do. He has years’ worth of stories, and the way he looks while he’s telling them reminds her of herself.

She misses the others, too - particularly Max, her confidante, her guide, her rock. She can hardly bear to hear her friend grieving from afar, and part of it is guilt that she knew Billy in his final moments, better than Max ever will. She never wishes for eloquence as much as when Max is trying not to cry, because she has the strangest feeling that her loss of Papa, a man she’d feared and despised yet somehow loved, might, somehow, draw a parallel. She just doesn’t know how that works in words.

The others are less complicated. Lucas, whose initial distrust makes his unswerving loyalty all the sweeter now, when he tells her eagerly about a new exercise he’s thought of to try and regain her abilities. None of them work, but it’s nice to have an ongoing project to talk about. And Dustin, who never fails to make her smile, even on the days where she’s given up on even halfway happy. He and Suzie are still going strong, and maybe that’s why he’s so good at sounding like he’s right there next to her when they talk on the phone.

Of course, the one person she wishes she could talk to most is gone, and all she has is that piece of paper, worn in already by fingertips and tears. She keeps it by her bed, and she knows it off by heart now, which in a way makes it worse. You should never have so little of a person you love that you can commit it all to memory.

It touches her, though, to notice that Will knows the letter too. One particularly awful night, he slips into her room to sit with her, and when she’s sobbing too much to form the words he picks up where she left off, not needing to take the paper. Maybe it’s not absolutely perfect, but he hits all the important notes, and hearing them out loud, with the spontaneity of a speaker rather than a reader, and without having to be the one to say them herself, is its own kind of comfort.

After that night, she vows to be more aware of Will, more grateful, to notice him even when he’s trying not to be noticed. Especially then. In a sense, that had been the way right at the beginning, when she was tasked with finding him in the Upside Down. He’s always been good at hiding.

And so she notices, gets to know when his natural quiet lulls too far beneath the surface, lets him know she’s near. In full daylight, she becomes accustomed to reading the shadows in his face, to the point where she’s aware before he is, sometimes, that he’s about to be awash with needless dread.

“You’re okay,” she tells him, and the third or fourth time it happens he looks at her in wonderment.

“How do you do that?” he asks.

She gives a small smile. “Superpowers.”

His eyes widen. “They’re back?”

“No.”

And they’re not, yet – not the ones she had before, anyway. Maybe they never will be. Or maybe she’ll rediscover them just when she needs them most. But for now, she has something different altogether.

“It’s the same thing you do,” she says. “Maybe it’s a twin thing.”

And Will smiles back at her, the shadows gone for now. “That must be it,” he says, and in moments like this one, home doesn’t feel so far away.


End file.
